House GOP plans student loan bill

House Republicans are looking to rain on President Barack Obama’s student loan parade.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced Wednesday that the House will vote on a bill to keep government-subsidized student loan rates from doubling for the next year, a tactic aimed at blunting Obama’s attempt to paint the GOP as deaf to the concerns of college students.

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But it’s not that simple. To avoid adding to the debt, Republicans will try to take money from a public health prevention fund in the Democrats’ 2010 health care law. Senate Democrats are aiming for a separate mechanism to offset the price tag of the extension. And that could set up a showdown between the two bodies and the president during this hotly contested election year.

The specter of Stafford loan rates doubling is the most recent attempt by the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill to paint Republicans as the model of inaction. President Barack Obama is on a nationwide college tour, slamming congressional Republicans for allowing the Stafford loan rate to jump on July 1.

The GOP budget, which passed overwhelmingly in the House, assumed that the student loan rate would jump — Boehner said for budgetary purposes, his party assumed that current law would stay in place.

“This week the president is traveling the country on the taxpayers’ dime, campaigning and trying to invent a fight where there isn’t one,” Boehner said Wednesday, standing alongside Reps. Jeb Hensarling of Texas and John Kline of Minnesota. “There never has been one on this issue of student loans, but we can, and will, fix the problem without a bunch of campaign-style theatrics.”

Obama and congressional Democrats tried to get out ahead of the GOP on that issue, looking to define them before they could craft a legislative solution.